To:MAXIM GORKY

Published:First published in 1924 inLenin Miscellany I.

      Sent to Capri.

      Printed from the original.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1976],

      Moscow,Volume 35,

      pages50-51.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Cracow, August 1, 1912

Krakau,Oesterreich.Zwierzyniec. 218.Wl. Ulijanow

Ihave received your letter and a letter from the
Siberians. My address now is not Paris, but Cracow—see above.

Ihaven’t quite understood what party you have decided
to expel me from. From the Socialist-Revolutionary perhaps?

No,joking apart, it’s a bad, philistine, bourgeois style
you have adopted, to wave us away with a “you’re all
squabblers”. Just have a look at the latest S.R. literature
—Pochin, Izvestia zagranichnoi oblastnoi organizatsii—
compare it withRevolutsionnaya Mysland withRevolutsionnaya
Rossiya[2]—and then again with
Ropshin,[3]etc.
RememberVekhi[4]and the polemics (quasi-polemics)
conducted against it by Milyukov,
Gredeskul[5](who has now
discovered that a second revolution in Russia is not
necessary), etc., etc.

Compareallthis as a whole, the sumtotalof ideological
trends from 1908 to 1912 among the
S.R.s,[6]Trudoviks,[7]Bezzaglavtsi[8]and
Cadets,[9]with what existed and exists
among the Social-Democrats (somebody, some day—
probably a historian—will certainly do this work). You will
see thateveryone, literally everyone outside the
Social-Democrats was discussingthe samequestions, literally the
very same, on account of which little groups have brokenaway from our Party in the direction of liquidationism and
otzovism.

Thebourgeois, the liberals, the S.R.s like to shout about
“squabbles” among the Social-Democrats, because they
themselves do not take “painful questions”seriously, tag
along behind others, play the diplomat, and make do with
eclecticism. The difference between the Social-Democrats
and all of them is that among the Social-Democrats
squabbles are the externals of a struggle of groups withprofoundand clear ideological roots, whileamong themsquabbles
are externally smoothed over, internally empty, petty,
trivial. Never and not for anything would I exchange the
sharp struggle of currents of opinion among the
Social-Democrats for the nicely smoothed emptiness and
intellectual poverty of the S.R.s and Co.

Allthe very best.

Yours,Lenin

P.S.Greetings to M. F.!

P.S.And in Russia there is arevolutionaryrevival, not
just a revival, but a revolutionary one. And we have
managed at last to set up a dailyPravda—incidentally, thanks
precisely to that (January)
Conference[1]which the fools
are yapping at.

[1]TheSixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.
—Ed.

[2]Thepublications mentioned here—Pochin(Beginning),Izvestia
zagranichnoi oblastnoi organizatsii(Journal of the Regional
Organisation Abroad),Revolutsionnaya Mysl(Revolutionary Thought)
andRevolutsionnaya Rossiya(Revolutionary Russia)—were run
by various groups and|trends in the Socialist-Revolutionary
Party.

[3]Referenceis to the novels by V. Ropshin (B. Savinkov), one of the
leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party:Kon bledny(The
Pale Horse), published in the magazineRusskaya Mysl(Russian
Thought) No. 1 for 1909, andTo chego ne bylo(What Never
Happened), published in the magazineZavety(Behests) Nos. 1–8,
April–November 1912, and in No. 1 for January 1913.

[4]Vekhi(Landmarks)—a symposium published by the
Constitutional-Democrats in Moscow in the spring of 1909. Its articles
devoted to the Russian intelligentsia cast a slur on the
revolutionary-democratic traditions of the liberation movement in Russia, and the
views and activities of the outstanding revolutionary democrats^of
the nineteenth century V. G. Belinsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov,
N. G. Chernyshevsky and D. I. Pisarev. The contributors to thesymposium vilified the revolutionary movement of 1905 and
thanked the tsarist government for protecting the privileged classes
“with its bayonets and jails” from “fury of the people”.

[5]Milyukov,P. N.(1859–1948)—leader of the Constitutional–
Democratic (Cadet) Party, prominent ideologist of the Russian
imperialist bourgeoisie. One of the men who in October 1905 founded the
Cadet Party, he became chairman of its Central Committee and
editor of its central organ, the newspaperRech(Speech). He was a
member of the Third and Fourth Dumas. After the February
bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917 he became Minister for
Foreign Affairs in the bourgeois Provisional Government and after
the October Socialist Revolution helped to organise the foreign
military intervention against Soviet Russia. Later ho was active
among the White émigrés.

Gredeskul,N. A.(b. 1864)—professor of law, publicist,
Constitutional-Democrat; deputy to the First Duma. Worked on CadetRechand a number of other bourgeois-liberal papers. In 1916 he
left the Constitutional-Democratic Party. After the October
Socialist Revolution taught as a professor in Leningrad.

[6]Socialist-RevolutionaryParty(S.R.s)—a petty-bourgeois party in
Russia; emerged at the end of 1901 and the beginning of 1902 as a
result of the union of various Narodnik groups and circles. The
S.R.s did not recognise the class differences between the
proletariat and the small owners. They glossed over the class
differentiation and contradictions within the peasantry and denied the
leading role of the proletariat in the revolution. The tactics of
individual terrorism which the S.R.s advocated as the main form
of struggle against the autocracy did great harm to the
revolutionary movement and made it more difficult to organise the masses
for revolutionary struggle.

TheBolshevik Party exposed the S.R.s’ attempts to masquerade
as socialists, waged a determined struggle against them for
influence over the peasantry, and exposed the harm caused to the
working-class movement by their tactics of individual terrorism. At
the same time the Bolsheviks, under certain conditions, made
temporary agreements with the S.R.s in the struggle against
tsarism.

Theheterogeneity of the peasantry as a class determined the
political and ideological instability and organisational disunity
of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and their constant wavering
between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the period of
reaction (1907–10) the S.R.s suffered complete ideological and
organisational collapse. During the first world war the majority
of them became social-chauvinists.

Afterthe victory of the February bourgeois-democratic
revolution in 1917, the S.R.s together with the Mensheviks and the
Cadets were the mainstay of the counter-revolutionary
bourgeois-landowner Provisional Government, and their leaders (Kerensky,
Avksentyev, Chernov) were members of it. The S.R. Party refusedto support the peasant demand for abolition of the landed estates
and came out in favour of landed proprietorship. The S.R.
ministers in the Provisional Government sent punitive expeditions
against peasants who had seized the landowners’ estates.

Atthe end of November 1917, the Left wing of the party formed
the independent party of Left S.R.s. In an attempt to preserve their
influence over the mass of the peasants, the Left S.R.s formally
recognised Soviet power and came to an agreement with the
Bolsheviks, but soon joined the struggle against Soviet power.

Duringthe years of foreign intervention and civil war, the
S.R.s engaged in counter-revolutionary subversion, actively
supported the interventionists and whiteguards, participated in
counter-revolutionary conspiracies, and organised terrorist acts
against leaders of the Soviet state and the Communist Party.
After the Civil War the S.R.s continued their hostile activities
against the Soviet state.

[7]Trudovikgroup(Trudoviks)—group of petty-bourgeois democrats
in the Duma, consisting of peasants and intellectuals with a
Narodnik orientation.

Theirpolitics were the class politics of the small peasant
farmer and the Trudoviks in the Duma wavered between the Cadets
and Social-Democrats. Since the Trudoviks did to some extent
represent the peasant masses, the Bolsheviks in the Duma adopted
tactics of co-operating with them, in certain fields, for the sake of
the common struggle against tsarist autocracy and the Cadets.

[8]Bezzaglavtsi—semi-Cadet, semi-Menshevik group of the Russian
bourgeois intelligentsia, formed when the revolution of 1905–07
was on the wane. It took its name from the political weeklyBez
Zaglaviya(Without a Title) published in St. Petersburg between
January and May 1906. Under cover of their formal non–
attachment to any party, the Bezzaglavtsi advocated bourgeois-liberal
and opportunist ideas, and supported the revisionists in the
Russian and international Social-Democratic movement.

[9]Witte,S. Y.(1849–1915)—statesman of tsarist Russia, a convinced
supporter of the autocracy, who sought to preserve the monarchy
by means of small concessions and promises to the liberalbourgeoisie and harsh repressive measures against the people. He was
Prime Minister (1905–06).